Michelle Dean

I still think, most of the time, when people called shows like 'The Sopranos' or 'Deadwood' 'art' that they were correct.

Summer is always a tricky time to recommend new literary fiction. The big releases do not hit until fall.

For a long time, it seemed as if podcasting was a male realm, but no longer. Sure, there are lots of men doing podcasts, but women are voicing a lot of the form's biggest hits. 'Serial,' the podcast that made podcasts a phenomenon, was narrated by a woman.

The forward march of American literature is usually chronicled by way of its male novelists. There is little sense, in that version of the story, that women writers of those eras were doing much worth remembering.

I read almost no romantic fiction, in part because I barely believe in romance in the age of Tinder.

The phenomenon of Instagram poets - who are also, to be fair, Tumblr poets and Pinterest poets - has been one of the more surprising side-effects of the selfie age.

The 'World Wide Web', as people quaintly called the Internet in 1996, was more or less made up of text. There was no YouTube. There was no Facebook. There was, however, Usenet, a loose and difficult-to-navigate assortment of message boards.

Since the era of 'Sherlock Holmes,' private detectives had long been able to influence cases on their own. But the online detective, who had no sort of professional training or even long practice, is a purely modern phenomenon. The Internet changed everything by letting anyone become a self-appointed 'expert' on a case.

Millennials' has become a kind of modern swearword, a slur directed at people in their early 20s.

There's no good way to be the center of a media maelstrom you did not choose for yourself.

We are reminded repeatedly, often by older men, that western civilization has died on the altar of social media.

Poems are ideally suited, in some ways, to social media because they pack so much meaning into so little language.